Structural Realization and Functionality of Grammatical Metaphor in Nollywood Films

Metaphor is a semantic shift in language use, either in form or function. A metaphorical expression has various realisations through its interpretation. Grammatical metaphor is a concept in Halliday’s systemic functional theory (SFT). The concept expresses different modes of presenting social realities in social contexts, thereby revealing how social experience could be constructed in different grammatical structures. This paper, therefore, investigates the form and function of grammatical metaphor in Nollywood films, thereby studying different meanings constructed in the metaphorical and congruent modes of the metaphors. Halliday’s grammatical metaphor, especially ideational metaphor, is employed to examine metaphors in Nollywood films in Yoruba subtitled in English and Nollywood films in English. The study reveals that metaphorical expressions are used in Nollywood films to construct sociocultural realities. Every metaphorical expression has two forms: metaphorical mode and congruent mode. Different grammatical categories are used in the construction of both grammatical modes and the congruent mode. The metaphorical mode encodes experiential meaning while the congruent mode expresses literal meaning. The same or different types of processes can take place in both the metaphorical and the congruent modes. The study concludes that the interpretation of a metaphor necessitates making a choice of a structural form that communicates a clearer meaning.